Chapter 13 Very Uncool
Very Uncool
ELLA
“The boundaries are the garden and the woods.” Alix gives me a hopeful little push toward Mikkel and closes her eyes to begin the count. “One, Dragonslayer. Two, Dragonslayer. Three, Dragonslayer…”
Dahlia darts behind a statue with a groomsman while Yasmin, in fur boots and skin-hugging athletic-wear, crouches in the middle of a path and puts her hands over her face. Two more groomsmen scramble into fruit trees, raining white blossoms as they shake the boughs.
“I know a good spot,” Marc says, dragging Sondmark’s most famous actor to a cluster of topiaries by the back of his collar.
Amateur hour. I don’t waste time on the manicured confines of the garden, but shoot through a stone gate and into the woods.
I know this ground, having traveled every meter of it during my misspent youth.
Still, it’s May and the ground is wet. I slip up a rise, tripping over heavy roots coiling across my path.
“Forty-seven, Dragonslayer,” Alix calls, continuing her count. “Forty-eight…”
I brush my muddy knees and take a sharp turn.
It’s here, somewhere. Doubling back, I see the familiar silhouette of a particular tree, and slide into its large hollow.
I stand with my back against the trunk, slip a shoe off, and shake a twig out.
It’s wonderfully dark. My heart thumps with excitement and air burns through my lungs.
Above the wall, the bonfire casts the faintest light into the woods.
When I hear a soft rustle of underbrush, I hold my breath and shrink against the tree. So help me, if Alix sent Mikkel my way, I’ll bribe her colorist to turn her hair lime green.
The figure passes, checks, and changes direction, eventually blotting the light out entirely. I hold my breath until I hear the hushed whisper. “Ella, it’s me.”
I grab a handful of flannel, hauling Marc into the shelter. “You know this is my hiding spot,” I hiss.
A low chuckle vibrates against my chest. “I know it’s big enough for two. Were you expecting Mikkel?”
I drum a fist against his chest. “Did anyone follow you?”
Marc lightly grips my upper arms and leans his head out.
He’s been in a strange mood all night, frowning and silent.
His thumbs press into my upper arms, and heat radiates from his touch as from a small pebble thrown into a smooth pond, ripples colliding against every obstacle.
I shake my head. When Marc is in one of his protective moods he’s always grumpy.
“One hundred!” Alix shouts, her voice muffled and distant.
At first, Alix and Tom collect the easy prey—friends whose commitment to the game lasted only as long as it took to step behind a decorative urn.
The losers return to the fire, and their conversation lays down a soothing murmur, punctuated as the minutes pass by shrieks and shouts when other guests are flushed from hiding spots.
All the while, Marc and I stand in silence, his thumbs gently brushing my arms. His breath stirs my hair and his scent is a mixture of soju and subtle cologne. I stare straight forward, resorting to an old trick to hold myself together. Harald, Frederick, Frederick II, Frederick III…
He looks up and drops his head, no sooner settled than shifting again. “You still have a trash panda account,” he says.
He can’t see my furrowed brow. “No, I don’t. I sent you screenshots—”
“SquadRun,” he cuts in.
That. My body eases. “Nobody knows about that.”
“Ella.”
It hurts when he says my name, but I want to lean into Marc, punishing myself for the sin of wanting him.
I swallow thickly. I want gravity to work differently than it does—to push us together no matter which way we sway.
I want to kiss him and bear no responsibility for it.
It will just be one of those things that happen.
One of those things that can’t be helped.
Louis, Malthe, Malthe II… I whisper my answer. “I’ve had that account for more than eight years.”
His hands begin to trace a pattern up and down my arms, slow, soothing passes. “I know. You took that handle in Palo Alto when you discovered that raccoon who liked to raid the trash bin,” he says.
I smile at the memory. “I was so freaked out that I climbed you. I had a leg hooked over your shoulder.”
He laughs, the soft sound wrapping me in a pleasant warmth. His next words bring a chill. “You have to get rid of that account, too.”
How can he ask this? The palace is a fishbowl, but against all odds, I created a community lasting a miraculous eight years.
Does he think it happened by accident? Online friendships are delicate, hardly able to sustain an altered time zone or a change of relationship status—I’ve listened to boyfriend woes, offered free tutoring, and blown off all manner of deadlines to preserve this sanctuary.
If I abandon it now, my team will disintegrate, reforming in some fashion, perhaps, but never the same.
“Anything else,” I bargain. “I’ll cram myself into a tight little royal box and make myself fit. I’ll be perfect,” I say, shoving his chest, practically granite under my hand.
Instead of cool stone, he’s warm flesh, and my old crush pushes through the surface like a tulip before a hard frost. It’s the wrong time to be raising its thick head.
Marc doesn’t budge. “What are you trying to do?” he asks, unbothered.
I push harder and try not to enjoy it. “You’re in my personal space.”
“You once climbed me,” comes his reminder. I can hear the laughter as he exhales, narrowing the tiny distance between us. “Freja and I have personal space. Alma and Clara and I have personal space. You and I don’t have personal space.”
Rough bark bites into my skin as I attempt to fuse with the tree. “Why can’t—”
His hand covers my mouth and his body settles against mine, head dipping to my ear. I freeze. “We have company.”
Alix and Tom stumble through the underbrush, laughing.
The pitch and weave of their cell phone lights tell a story of tipsiness, but when they move off, narrowing into distant pinpoints, Marc drops his hand.
I draw a shaky breath. My nearness doesn’t mean anything to him.
He builds walls between himself and his best friend’s lovestruck little sister like he’s been training for it his whole life, and I try to drill it into my stubborn skull that he’s not making a pass.
This is just his competitive streak and he’s trying to keep us from getting caught.
“How do you think you could be more perfect?” he prods, voice rough, resuming a topic I dropped alongside my sanity.
I bless the darkness. “I’ll read my speeches exactly how they’re written for me.
All my opinions will be laundered through the administration wing.
Inflation? Hate it. Literacy? Big fan. Teen pregnancy?
Won’t someone think of the babies?” A silent laugh hitches his chest. “I’ll order clothes that make me look like Alma. ”
“You mean those straight skirts and sort of filmy blouses?” I can hear his gathered brows. He’s trying to imagine it. “That’s a terrible idea.”
“Why?” I ask this focus group of one.
“It won’t work. They won’t look the same on you as they do on your sister.”
My cheeks flame as I parse out his meaning.
I know what I look like. I can’t walk into or out of my cursed palace without passing full-length mirrors in every direction, and it would take an idiot to miss the fact that I don’t have Freja’s delicate elegance, Alma’s stately majesty, or Clara’s enviable measurements.
I have to shrug off being called stout by boutique owners, described in the press as having a sturdy figure, or praised (in an actual speech with an actual transcript you can access on the actual government website) by the National Farmer’s Guild for my fine, buxom appearance.
For all that, I’m remarkably well-adjusted.
I like the way I look, even if I am fairly short and all business.
But having Marc point out all the invisible ways I fail to measure up to perfection feels like being in a boxing match and having my cornerman deliver an uppercut.
I expect him to send me back in the ring, patched up and ready to fight, but since he returned from Seong he hasn’t been able to keep a civil tongue in his head.
I punch him in the arm—light and teasing despite the way my heart stings. “Are you calling me a dumpling?”
“What? No. I said you won’t ever look like your sisters,” he corrects, catching my second fist before it makes contact.
A sharp breath escapes me. “Do you even hear yourself?”
“Oh,” he says, pushing a thumb into the fist and breaking it up, lacing his fingers through mine. Despite all the pain and irritation, a tiny lightning storm sparks through my veins. “I see the problem.”
I tug my hand but he holds it firmly. “You can wear those kinds of things if you want,” he tells me. “Just know that everyone will lose their damn minds.”
Soju has possibly knocked the corners off my ability to bring his meaning into focus. “Explain it to me like I’ve just sustained blunt force trauma.”
His gaze swings away, silvery moonlight touching the side of his face. “She asked,” he says, speaking to his ancestors, maybe. His gaze swings back. “She asked.”
He slides his arm around my waist and pulls me up on my toes. There is nothing brotherly about his hold, and the shock of it evaporates the air in my lungs.
“That third wish,” he says, gaze dropping to my mouth, leaving me in no doubt about what he wants.
He searches my face for some sign of assent and I only have a millisecond to think. This isn’t love—it just isn’t—but my mouth tips with a smile, and the voice in my head is dragonslayer2, shouting amid a hail of enemy fire. Take the shot!
“Yes,” I whisper.
Marc draws a ragged breath and drops his head, fisting his hands in the thick cotton of my hoodie. As soon as his lips touch mine, I stop caring that this might be his way of delivering an inspirational message on body-positivity. His mouth is warm and mobile and…
I sigh, our breath mingling, as he takes control.
I am intimately aware of how rich and full his life is, but he kisses like a gamer with a hyperfixation.
Like someone who has been cooped up in a basement for months, planning every move, playing and replaying this moment until the muscle memory is burned into his soul.
When he gathers me closer, destroying my peace from now until the day I die, a thread of panic races through my nerves.
Oh no, oh no, oh no. I had convinced myself that kissing Marc van Heyden would be like wearing a pair of espadrilles—something nicer in my head than it could ever be in real life.
But the reality of Marc’s lips on mine is much better than even my best attempts to imagine it.
He is not a disappointing kisser and I am in serious trouble.
I grip his shoulders, fragile with the desperate hope that he won’t see all the years I’ve spent wishing for this and hiding it. Vede, this is going to hurt. He must sense some withholding because he gives me a frustrated, coaxing shake.
Okay.
I release the tight grip on myself and pull him into me, tracing the scar in his hairline, down to his earlobe. When I brush it, a shiver travels across his shoulders and he holds onto me like I’m the only thing keeping him upright. For a few moments, I think it’s true.
He pauses to breathe, the drag of air coming with a shudder, and I smile against his lips. Marc is being very uncool.
I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was going to be this good. It was supposed to be an adolescent crush, as dead as a felled oak, hauled out of the woods. Now that same ground is sprouting fairy rings—new magic growing from the roots of the old. What am I going to do?
Before I can hazard an answer, a crash breaks us apart. I stumble against the tree just as a pair of bright flashlights pierce the dark sanctuary.